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Falling Crime In New York Defies Trend

It is a question as compelling as any of the mysteries that police officials and criminologists routinely encounter: Why should crime continue an 11-year decline in New York City when it is on the rise elsewhere around the country?

Policing strategies? At least a dozen other cities adopted some of the New York Police Department's innovative programs following their successes, and while crime declined in several, others have seen crime rise.

Drug use? New York City is no longer the crack capital of America, and experts say hard drug use here has waned. But in some cities with apparent downturns in drug use crime has risen, and in some with intractable drug problems crime has dropped.

The economy? Since the Sept. 11 attack, New York has faced fiscal problems as bad as any city in the nation, with a $6.4 billion budget deficit for the next fiscal year and a 7.8 percent unemployment rate coupled with increasing homelessness and a shrunken welfare roll. But its resilient crime declines have continued despite the failing economy.

Prison population? The number of people in the city being sentenced to terms in state prison, where those convicted of more serious crimes serve their time, has steadily declined over the last decade, with nearly half as many people entering the system last year compared with 1990.

''It is the mystery of the ages,'' said Jeffrey A. Fagan, a professor of law and public health at Columbia University who has studied crime and New York City's criminal justice system for 15 years. ''Certainly no one has articulated what the right variables are that will produce a crime increase when configured in one way in a city and, when configured another way in a city, will produce a decline.''

Not everyone, however, says they are stumped by the phenomenon. New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly cites the failure of many cities to make the sustained investment New York undertook more than a decade ago, when the Safe Streets, Safe Cities program began the remarkable expansion that eventually increased the ranks of the department by nearly 40 percent.

With the larger force, which eventually peaked at 40,710 officers, Mr. Kelly's predecessors, including William Bratton, the first of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's three police commissioners, used new programs, including Compstat, a system of crime mapping and management accountability that has been exported from New York to other cities, to focus on serious crimes and quality-of-life violations. Some contend that such petty offenses lead to more serious crimes.

Michael Jacobson, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says that focus on smaller crimes -- and, over the last eight years, the arrests of about one million people on minor violations for which they spent the night in jail -- has characterized the New York City approach more than anything else.

And while Professor Jacobson, who headed the city's Correction and Probation Departments under former Mayors David N. Dinkins and Giuliani, was wary of suggesting that the strategy alone was responsible for New York's success, in the face of crime increases elsewhere, he says it has given the police the opportunity to check warrants and search suspects, and thus helped get guns off the streets and reduce crime.

At the same time, he says, the practice brought with it a host of problems, not the least of which was the fraying effect such zero tolerance approaches have on the already tense relationship between police officers and residents in some of the city's poorer neighborhoods they patrol.

But criminologists and police officials around the nation are far from uniformly embracing any of the theories for the drop in crime. And so to some, there are other factors at work in addition to police strategies, the economy and patterns of drug use, such as the involvement of communities with the police, and demographic and social forces. While to others, it is beyond knowing without additional study. ''Crime has been going down for a decade, and people are still fighting about why,'' Professor Jacobson said.

But New York City's continuing crime reduction appears to be a fact, not an interpretation. Murder and auto crime, the two statistics criminologists consider most reliable because dead bodies and stolen cars seldom go unreported, both have continued to drop this year. As of last week, murder was continuing its robust decline, down 12.7 percent over the same period last year, while car theft was down 9.8 percent and overall crime was down 5.3 percent.

The same good news, however, has not held in many other cities.

Crime Inches Up Nationwide

F.B.I. statistics released at the end of last month for the 2001 calendar year show crime rising nationwide for the first time since 1991, with murder inching up 2.5 percent over 2000, car thefts up 5.7 percent and robberies up 3.7 percent. Overall crime rose 2.1 percent over the previous year, with crime increases in cities on both coasts and in the nation's midsection.

In Boston, the statistics show, overall crime, car theft and murder rose in 2001, with killings up sharply, jumping to 65 from 39, an increase officials there called an aberration after 10 years of almost steady declines, with fewer than 40 murders in each of the last three years. So far this year, overall crime in Boston is down slightly, and with 51 killings through the end of last week, the city appears on track to end the year with fewer murders than it had in 2001, but still far more than the figure for 2000.

Over the same period, after years of declines, murder and overall crime also climbed in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Antonio, among other cities, according to F.B.I. statistics, with killings jumping 48 percent in Las Vegas, 37.5 percent in Phoenix and 17.6 percent in San Antonio. Murder also rose in Chicago and Los Angeles, which with 602 homicides so far this year has already surpassed last year's tally of 587, according to that city's most recent statistics.

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The reasons for some of the increases cited by police officials and sociologists are as varied as the communities themselves. They range from the release from prison of a particularly violent cadre of criminals and their efforts to re-establish street-corner hegemony in Boston to the law enforcement's shift in focus along the Southwest border after the Sept. 11 attacks and its impact on the murder rate in Phoenix.

In Boston, the crime declines over the last decade were so drastic they have been referred to as the Boston Miracle. They have been widely credited to a novel relationship between the police there and a group of black clergy, which served as an intermediary with the city's poorer communities. Murder, fueled by gang- and drug-related homicides, peaked in 1990 with 152 killings. Over the next 10 years, the number plummeted to 39, as the murder rate nationwide also declined, while at a significantly slower rate. But last year, the number of killings jumped to 65, according to the F.B.I. statistics.

Christopher Winship, a sociology professor at Harvard University who has studied the relationship between the police and the clergy in Boston cites an increase in felons returning to communities from prison over the last two years. In a paper on the phenomenon published in March, he said that as many as 250 people a month were flooding from prison into the city's neighborhoods.

''The belief is that many recent killings involve retribution and/or attempts to retake drug markets that were lost when the individuals were sent to prison,'' Professor Winship said.

A spokesman for the Phoenix Police Department said the sharp jump in killings there -- to 209 in last year from 152 the previous year -- should be examined in the context of the murder rate over time, noting that killings in the city hovered around 200 annually for more than five years. The dramatic increase came after the particularly low number in 2000, when stepped-up federal law enforcement along the Southwest border cut drug trafficking, greatly reducing the number of killings tied to the trade, said the spokesman, Sgt. Randy Force.

The next year, after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, when shifting priorities moved the focus away from the Mexican border, the pace of killing in Phoenix quickened, he said. While overall crime rose 7.6 percent in 2001, it came after what Sergeant Force said was a 20 percent drop over five years.

The reported increases in these and other cities and in the country as a whole came as little surprise to many who follow crime trends, because experts have long questioned when the steady declines would end and crime would begin to rise again, a pendulum swing that many criminologists view as inevitable. But several said it was too soon to reach to any conclusions about whether the F.B.I. statistics represent a turnaround or a broader trend.

''After 10 years of decline, one year of a moderate increase doesn't necessarily mean anything,'' said Jerome H. Skolnick, a law professor at New York University, where he is the co-director of the Center for Research on Crime and Justice.

The New York Exception

While the explanations for New York's continuing crime decline vary widely, many experts agree that it is particularly noteworthy because Mr. Kelly and several top aides have spent much of the past year working to prevent possible terrorist attacks, creating an entire Counterterrorism Bureau and reorganizing the Intelligence Division to focus on terrorism as well as traditional crime. The department has marshaled significant resources toward that end, with 1,000 officers re-assigned to counterterrorism units.

New York's continuing crime declines have come despite drops in summonses and misdemeanor arrests -- key parts of the zero tolerance program -- and the budget cuts, which combined with attrition have reduced the force from its peak to about 38,000. That number is likely to shrink by several thousand more officers.

So, with the F.B.I. numbers raising the possibility that a nationwide turnaround could be at hand, some current and former New York police officials believe Mr. Kelly's most significant challenges lie ahead, and experts say the question of why New York's crime rate keeps going down becomes an even more pressing issue.

One academic is trying to answer at least part of that question by examining the impact of Compstat in other cities where it has been adopted. They include Philadelphia and Baltimore, where former New York police officials oversaw significant declines, and others where crime initially dropped but later began to inch up.

Andrew Karmen, a sociology professor at John Jay College who has written a book about the city's murder rate, ''New York Murder Mystery,'' has begun a study on more than 12 cities outside New York that have adopted the program. ''The easy answers -- the economy, improved policing and greater incarceration -- don't hold up if you look carefully,'' he said.

Professor Karmen has also urged the establishment of a special city- or state-financed commission to examine New York's successes. ''Something very special and positive is happening in New York,'' he said. The city's experiences needed to be studied, he added, ''so that should things begin to reverse, we will have an idea why, and so that other cities can learn.''